Updating CSS

My muscle memory on CSS is full of left and right, top and bottom. The newer attributes of -inline and -block use start and end qualifiers to avoid confusion with right to left languages. This month I made an effort to try and convert my older hobby code over to the new format to try and get the new names ingrained in my memory.

Another example of things in web development that have now to be unlearnt is that target="blank" is now safe by default. This used to be something that used to be drilled into web developers..

Learning with LLMs

I had my first positive experience using a LLM-based model to learn to code something this month. It was an interesting set of circumstances that led to it really working for me where it hadn’t before.

• I didn’t know much about the topic, therefore I didn’t know how to formulate search queries that gave me good results
• The official documentation was complete but poorly written and organised, exploring text can be the perfect task for an LLM
• Information was scattered over several sites, including Medium. There wasn’t one article or site that really had a definitive answer so synthesising across several sources really helped. I wanted the text of the official documentation combined with the working code from a real person’s blog post.

I used a couple of different systems but Codemate was the most helpful follow by Google’s Gemini.

Previously I’ve been searching for information that I know quite well and therefore instead of getting a lot of value from the information compared to any hallucinated misses the mistakes were irritating me. Summarising data from multiple sources is genuinely an LLM superpower so this consolidation of several not great sources was probably right in its sweet spot.

URL exploring and saving

I needed to build up some queries on a system’s API this month. I decided to give Slumber a go after trying some local Postman-style clones.

The tool is a TUI and uses a YAML file as its store and dynamically syncs the UI when the file is saved. There were a couple of issues; for example it would be helpful to be able to save the content of a response to file and if something is marked sensitive (like the bearer token) then I would prefer to see it masked in the UI.

Overall though I got what I needed to done and the system was a lot easier than most web-based GUI tools that I’ve used as the underlying storage and its relation to the interface is really clear.

Also a shout out to chains, initially these seemed to be an example of making simple things complicated but as I understood them more then they are amazingly powerful for coordinating setups for calls.

Community events

I went to the May Day Data Science event for the first time. It seems the best talks were in rooms that had the least capacity and there was a strict no standing rule. Despite this I did pick up some useful bits and pieces, in particular around prompt design.

I also went to the Django Meetup held at the Kraken offices and was really struck by what a great engineering team they have built up there. Dave Seddon gave a great introduction to the “native library escape hatch” that exists in Python. This time showing how to bring in Rust code to help execution time.

I also went to the Python Meetup this month and spent a day in Milton Keynes at the Juxt 24 conference which had a lot of interesting talks and where I could have spent a lot more time at the afterparty.